The placement of the bonding pad directly on top of the I/O is made more remarkable by low-k dielectrics' tendency to mechanical weakness. A conventional wire bond package places the bonding pad outside of a chip's I/O slots.

The Pad on I/O approach supports two rows of staggered signal interconnects and a third outer row of power and ground connected directly to a die without using I/O slots.

The three rows of connections in Pad on I/O packages will support a 25 percent higher I/O density than conventional wire bond packages, and will be able to support up to 780 signaling pins and more than 200 power and ground connections, said LSI Logic technical marketing manager Stan Mihelcic. Pad pitch can be reduced to 27 microns, down from 40 microns on conventional wire bond packages.

New designs of cost-sensitive products can expect the Pad on I/O approach to resolve pad-limit problems, extend the life of wire bonding, and cut overall costs, LSI Logic said. High-performance products can also use the approach, the company said.

"By going to a three-row Pad on I/O package we have achieved a 50 percent reduction in the die size for one product, from 10.6 millimeters on a side to 7.6 mm," Mihelcic said in an interview here.

Flip-chip vs. wire bond

To be sure, flip-chip packages will continue to have lower inductance, higher signaling rates and higher I/O densities than wire bond packages. Those attributes have led LSI Logic and other chip makers to extend flip-chip packaging to lower-cost, four-layer plastic substrates.

But the Pad on I/O approach will allow wire bond packages to extend their reach upward as flip-chip packages continue to reach downward, Mihelcic said. Wire bonding may account for only about a third of all 130-nm designs at LSI Logic, and the Pad on I/O approach may partially reverse a trend toward flip-chip packages.

Ronnie Vasishta, vice president of technical marketing at LSI Logic, said the company realized when working on 0.18-micron designs that nearly all products would be pad limited at 0.13-micron and finer design rules. Even as the silicon area required for active circuitry is reduced, the need for an equal or greater number of I/O pads around the perimeter of a die would prohibit a reduction of overall die size without some innovation, Vasishta said.

LSI Logic assigned a team of its packaging engineers  it employs about 40 in-house  to worked with suppliers to develop the materials that could support a three-row wire bonding approach. The company no longer owns a packaging prototype line in Fremont, Calif., but works with outside packaging houses. It will license its Pad on I/O approach to these partners and to packaging subcontractors worldwide. For the Pad on I/O project, major makers of wire bond equipment were contacted to make sure their machines could be adjusted for the force, power and time parameters that define wire bonding.

LSI Logic has tested the approach on many different designs and has subjected evaluation vehicles to various accelerated thermal stress tests. No evidence was found of opens or shorts, which indicate low-k cracking and material delamination.

"There are no downsides that we have found, and we have designs under way today that will go into production in the middle of next year," Vasishta said. LSI Logic expects that eventually all of its wire bonded products will use the Pad On I/O approach.